alaris2

very nice work Xeno - is it articulated?

2) a finger no less. printed directly to a hot bed which costs £20 to make, oh and dual extrusion too from a hybrid V2 and an all metal hotend. (cos I was twiddling my fingers waiting for UM to make a hot bed, then I thought, let's just do it. so if I can do it, you can do it so much easier!)

I keep getting requests to post these, so here goes. 1) SG's most excellent direct drive upgrade. never tension those stupid short belts, never have a naf print again. nice work SG! of course, all self-respecting UM owners have already made this upgrade, so it's hardly news I realize, I'm a bit late with this..

that's definitely a novel idea there Ian! I'll await the stl with excitement!

actually I'm after a printable extruder Ian, so I'd love to test that when you're ready (if you're up for it). I saw y'all were discussing metal hotends, printing nylon, and new slicers over on google. guess the guys there don't realize we've already done all of that right here on this forum - they're missing out on so much by not being here. you might like the new slicer that's coming - it handles negative space correctly, so no more heartache for you. nik

hey, Ian is back, and designing some sexy stuff it looks like! thought we'd lost you to google Ian.

that's very clever Robert - I tried a similar technique once (which was why I asked) and injected a sort of rubberized paint into the recess. the problems I had were - 1) the color bled into the PLA (it seems the PLA leeched the color and so didn't give a crisp edge that I wanted) this wasn't helped by the alcohol which dissolved some of the color during cleaning and then spread it into the fine inter-layer lines. 2) when cleaning up, the paint stuck to itself better than to the PLA, so I would sometimes remove the infill as well as the bit I was cleaning, so then had to go back and re-fill

you're turning into a proper designer now Robert, nice work! how did you do the text inlay? is that printed separately and slotted in place?

ian> good question, and I don't know the answer, but it apparently works. there are several new printers coming out using this method. I found it while investigating the fishing wire trick used by tantillus. how long it works is another matter! yzorg> SG is correct, using bevels is not recommended, actually no gearing really is since it will just introduce additional points of failure or backlash. if the mod is considered too 'ugly' (personally I think it's just fine), pancake motors are the correct solution. let's face it - you have a big extruder sticking out the back of the UM alread

I made a note that for GT2, the following are known to work (but you can see from the price why I haven't tried it yet) http://www.royalsupply.com/store/pc/Gat ... tm#details http://www.royalsupply.com/store/pc/Gat ... p17193.htm the synchromesh cable is here - much cheaper alternative https://sdp-si.com/eStore/PartDetail.as ... roupID=768 I'm fairly sure that new pulleys are required in both cases - our current ones won't match the tooth profile.

aside from getting rid of the short belts which I hope to be able to do too at some point in the very near future the next thing is to deal with the long belts. I've measured considerable backlash in prints caused by the belts (right now I can't be sure how much is accounted for by the short and how much by the long) even when the belts are so tight they're at breaking point. there comes a point where additional tightening of the belts actually makes things worse - there really is a sweet spot. staying in that sweet spot is difficult - I find constant adjustments are necessary if you really

are those the 3W ones? if so, you only need 10 around the bed and you can do away with the hot end completely (and your eyesight too)

you could write some g-code to move the head with a laser strapped to it and feed that to david?

looking at the price tag, i hope she comes with the handscanner.

that's one more article than I ever saw then. there are plenty of claims about resolution to 40 microns, but be wary, what you can do in Z you cannot do in X and Y, and what is claimed in any is often for a Yoda head, not a precision calibration object. If I had to write a spec. for UM I'd say you can do 100 microns on a good day if you know what you're up to and set the machine up nicely. I'm hoping someone will challenge me and say, no, UM can do so much better, at which point I'll ask them to print and show us all a calibration item that proves it, and then I'll buy them a beer, or maybe